iPhone Siri vs. Windows Phone TellMe in fair comparison video

Apple’s Siri voice-driven intelligent assistant app called Siri faces off with Microsoft’s similarly capable Windows Phone TellMe app in a new YouTube video that claims to be a more fair comparison of the two. A video had previously compared Siri and TellMe but had mainly featured commands that TellMe does not yet understand.

The first video surfaced as a response to Microsoft’s claims that most of the functionality found in the recently launched Siri feature has been available on the Windows Phone since a year ago. However, TellMe in its current iteration is very much command-driven and not as advanced at recognizing natural speech. Hence, the first video made TellMe look rather inept.

This latest video of a “fair” comparison, shows TellMe performing well at speech recognition, searching for weather, searching for photos, sending text messages, finding a restaurant, and playing music. The user doing the comparison had a heavy Hungarian accent and it appears TellMe was better at understanding it. Siri is seen several times fibbing at getting speech recognition right due to the accent, but still has a smoother faster response to commands.

Siri was introduced with the launch of iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S back in October. The feature, however, is still in beta and is restricted to the iPhone 4S for now. Microsoft’s TellMe feature has been part of its Windows Phone platform for some time now and the company recently demoed new speech recognition improvements that should make it a better rival to Siri.